Autumn, 1942: It Came Down to One Marine, and One Ship

Ask the significance of the date, and you're likely to draw some
puzzled looks—five more days to stock up for Halloween?

It's a measure of men like Col. Mitchell Paige and Rear Adm. Willis
A. "Ching Chong China" Lee that they wouldn't have had it any other
way. What they did 58 years ago, they did precisely so their
grandchildren could live in a land of peace and plenty.

Whether we've properly safeguarded the freedoms they fought to leave
us, may be a discussion best left for another day. Today we struggle
to envision—or, for a few of us, to remember—how the world must
have looked on Oct. 26, 1942. A few thousand lonely American Marines
had been put ashore on Guadalcanal, a god-forsaken malarial jungle
island which just happened to lie like a speed bump at the end of the
long blue-water slot between New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago—the
very route the Japanese Navy would have to take to reach
Australia.

On Guadalcanal the Marines built an air field. And Japanese commander
Isoroku Yamamoto immediately grasped what that meant. No effort would
be spared to dislodge these upstart Yanks from a position that could
endanger his ships during any future operations to the south. Before
long, relentless Japanese counterattacks had driven supporting U.S.
Navy from inshore waters. The Marines were on their own.

World War Two is generally calculated from Hitler's invasion of
Poland in 1939. But that's a eurocentric view. The Japanese had been
limbering up their muscles in Korea and Manchuria as early as 1931,
and in China by 1934. By 1942 they'd devastated every major Pacific
military force or stronghold of the great pre-war powers: Britain,
Holland, France, and the United States. The bulk of America's proud
Pacific fleet lay beached or rusting on the floor of Pearl Harbor. A
few aircraft carriers and submarines remained, though as Mitchell
Paige and his 30-odd men were sent out to establish their last, thin
defensive line on that ridge southwest of the tiny American
bridgehead on Guadalcanal on Oct. 25, he would not have been much
encouraged to know how those remaining American aircraft carriers
were faring offshore.

(The next day, their Mark XV torpedoes—carrying faulty magnetic
detonators reverse-engineered from a First World War German design—proved
so ineffective that the United States Navy couldn't even
scuttle the doomed and listing carrier Hornet with eight carefully
aimed torpedoes. Instead, our forces suffered the ignominy of leaving
the abandoned ship to be polished off by the enemy ... only after
Japanese commanders determined she was damaged too badly to be
successfully towed back to Tokyo as a trophy.)

As Paige—then a platoon sergeant—and his riflemen set about
carefully emplacing their four water-cooled Brownings, it's unlikely
anyone thought they were about to provide the definitive answer to
that most desperate of questions: How many able-bodied U.S. Marines
does it take to hold a hill against 2,000 desperate and motivated
attackers?

The Japanese Army had not failed in an attempt to seize any major
objective since the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. Their commanders
certainly did not expect the war to be lost on some God-forsaken
jungle ridge manned by one thin line of Yanks in khaki in October of
1942.

But in preceding days, Marine commander Vandegrift had defied War
College doctrine, "dangling" his men in exposed positions to draw
Japanese attacks, then springing his traps "with the steel vise of
firepower and artillery," in the words of Naval historian David
Lippman.

The Japanese regiments had been chewed up, good. Still, the American
forces had so little to work with that Paige's men would have only
the four 30-caliber Brownings to defend the one ridge through which
the Japanese opted to launch their final assault against Henderson
Field, that fateful night of Oct. 25.

By the time the night was over, "The 29th (Japanese) Infantry
Regiment has lost 553 killed or missing and 479 wounded among its
2,554 men," historian Lippman reports. "The 16th (Japanese)
Regiment's losses are uncounted, but the 164th's burial parties
handle 975 Japanese bodies. ... The American estimate of 2,200
Japanese dead is probably too low."

Among the 90 American dead and wounded that night were all the men in
Mitchell Paige's platoon. Every one. As the night wore on, Paige
moved up and down his line, pulling his dead and wounded comrades
back into their foxholes and firing a few bursts from each of the
four Brownings in turn, convincing the Japanese forces down the hill
that the positions were still manned.

The citation for Paige's Congressional Medal of Honor picks up the
tale: "When the enemy broke through the line directly in front of his
position, P/Sgt. Paige, commanding a machinegun section with fearless
determination, continued to direct the fire of his gunners until all
his men were either killed or wounded. Alone, against the deadly hail
of Japanese shells, he fought with his gun and when it was destroyed,
took over another, moving from gun to gun, never ceasing his
withering fire."

In the end, Sgt. Paige picked up the last of the 40-pound, belt-fed
Brownings—the same design which John Moses Browning famously fired
for a continuous 25 minutes until it ran out of ammunition at its
first U.S. Army trial—and did something for which the weapon was
never designed. Sgt. Paige walked down the hill toward the place
where he could hear the last Japanese survivors rallying to move
around his flank, the gun cradled under his arm, firing as he went.

The weapon did not fail.

# # #

Coming up at dawn, battalion executive officer Major Odell M. Conoley
first discovered the answer to our question: How many able-bodied
Marines does it take to hold a hill against two regiments of
motivated, combat-hardened infantrymen who have never known defeat?

On a hill where the bodies were piled like cordwood, Mitchell Paige
alone sat upright behind his 30-caliber Browning, waiting to see what
the dawn would bring.

One hill: one Marine.

But that was the second problem. Part of the American line had
fallen to the last Japanese attack. "In the early morning light, the
enemy could be seen a few yards off, and vapor from the barrels of
their machine guns was clearly visible," reports historian Lippman.
"It was decided to try to rush the position."

For the task, Major Conoley gathered together "three enlisted
communication personnel, several riflemen, a few company runners who
were at the point, together with a cook and a few messmen who had
brought food to the position the evening before."

Joined by Paige, this ad hoc force of 17 Marines counterattacked at
5:40 a.m., discovering that "the extremely short range allowed the
optimum use of grenades." In the end, "The element of surprise
permitted the small force to clear the crest."

And that's where the unstoppable wave of Japanese conquest finally
crested, broke, and began to recede. On an unnamed jungle ridge on an
insignificant island no one had ever heard of, called Guadalcanal.
Because of a handful of U.S. Marines, one of whom, now 82, lives out
a quiet retirement with his wife Marilyn in La Quinta, Calif.

But while the Marines had won their battle on land, it would be
meaningless unless the U.S. Navy could figure out a way to stop
losing night battles in "The Slot" to the northwest of the island,
through which the Japanese kept sending in barges filled with
supplies and reinforcements for their own desperate forces on
Guadalcanal.

The U.S. Navy had lost so many ships in those dreaded night actions
that the waters off Savo were given the grisly sailor's nickname by
which they're still known today: Ironbottom Sound.

So desperate did things become that finally, 18 days after Mitchell
Paige won his Congressional Medal of Honor on that ridge above
Henderson Field, Admiral Bull Halsey himself broke a stern War
College edict—the one against committing capital ships in
restricted waters. Gambling the future of the cut-off troops on
Guadalcanal on one final roll of the dice, Halsey dispatched into the
Slot his two remaining fast battleships, the USS South Dakota and the
USS Washington, escorted by the only four destroyers with enough fuel
in their bunkers to get them there and back.

In command of the 28-knot battlewagons was the right man at the right
place, gunnery expert Rear Adm. Willis A. "Ching Chong China" Lee.
Lee's flag flew aboard the Washington, in turn commanded by Captain
Glenn Davis.

As it turned out, the American destroyers need not have worried about
carrying enough fuel to get home. By 11 p.m. on Nov. 13, outnumbered
better than three-to-one by a massive Japanese task force driving
down from the northwest, every one of the four American destroyers
had been shot up, sunk, or set aflame, while the South Dakota—known
throughout the fleet as a jinx ship—managed to damage some
lesser Japanese vessels but continued to be plagued with electrical
and fire control problems.

"Washington was now the only intact ship left in the force," Lippman
writes. "In fact, at that moment Washington was the entire U.S.
Pacific Fleet. She was the only barrier between (Admiral) Kondo's
ships and Guadalcanal. If this one ship did not stop 14 Japanese
ships right then and there, America might lose the war. ...

"On Washington's bridge, Lieutenant Ray Hunter still had the conn. He
had just heard that South Dakota had gone off the air and had seen
(destroyers) Walke and Preston "blow sky high." Dead ahead lay their
burning wreckage, while hundreds of men were swimming in the water
and Japanese ships were racing in.

"Hunter had to do something. The course he took now could decide the
war. 'Come left,' he said, and Washington straightened out on a
course parallel to the one on which she (had been) steaming.
Washington's rudder change put the burning destroyers between her and
the enemy, preventing her from being silhouetted by their fires.

"The move made the Japanese momentarily cease fire. Lacking radar,
they could not spot Washington behind the fires. ...

"Meanwhile, Washington raced through burning seas. Everyone could see
dozens of men in the water clinging to floating wreckage. Flag
Lieutenant Raymond Thompson said, "Seeing that burning, sinking ship
as it passed so close aboard, and realizing that there was nothing I,
or anyone, could do about it, was a devastating experience.'

"Commander Ayrault, Washington's executive officer, clambered down
ladders, ran to Bart Stoodley's damage-control post, and ordered
Stoodley to cut loose life rafts. That saved a lot of lives. But the
men in the water had some fight left in them. One was heard to
scream, 'Get after them, Washington!' "

Sacrificing their ships by maneuvering into the path of torpedoes
intended for the Washington, the captains of the American destroyers
had given China Lee one final chance. The Washington was fast,
undamaged, and bristling with 16-inch guns. And, thanks to Lt.
Hunter's course change, she was also now invisible to the enemy.

Blinded by the smoke and flames, the Japanese battleship Kirishima
turned on her searchlights, illuminating the helpless South Dakota,
and opened fire. Finally, standing out in the darkness, Lee and Davis
could positively identify an enemy target.

The Washington's main batteries opened fire at 12 midnight precisely.
Her new SG radar fire control system worked perfectly. Between
midnight and 12:07 a.m., Nov. 14, the "last ship in the U.S. Pacific
Fleet" stunned the battleship Kirishima with 75, 16-inch shells. For
those aboard the Kirishima, it rained steel.

In seven minutes, the Japanese battleship was reduced to a funeral
pyre. She went down at 3:25 a.m., the first enemy sunk by an American
battleship since the Spanish-American War. Stunned, the remaining
Japanese ships withdrew. Within days, Yamamoto and his staff reviewed
their mounting losses and recommended the unthinkable to the
emperor—withdrawal from Guadalcanal.

But who remembers, today, how close-run a thing it was—the ridge
held by a single Marine, the battle won by the last American ship?

In the autumn of 1942.

When the Hasbro Toy Co. called up some years back, asking permission
to put the retired colonel's face on some kid's doll, Mitchell Paige
thought they must be joking.

But they weren't. That's his mug, on the little Marine they call "GI
Joe."